Writing+Prompts

As you complete this requirement, please copy & paste your prompt along with any information you feel might be useful (ie. links, artifacts). Pictures and audios may be included by the committee.

Shelley Addis The prompt is taken from an excerpt of the article summarized for SCKWP, "Literacy and the Aesthetic Experience: Engaging Children with the Visual Arts in the Teaching of Writing" by Mary Ethrenworth. Using Thomas Cole's painting, //The Oxbow// (available on [|www.metmuseum.org]). In this article, the author asks students to create a journal entry from the scene. The writer may be in a particular part of the painting or move around the landscape, deciding whether or not to come across people they know, etc. They may choose to write a historical journal entry. A model from the author is given: //This morning Willie and I got caught on the other side of the river, and we thought we were never going to make it back to the farm. We were playing in the bottom of the boat that Farmer Wilson ties up by the shore. We were playing that we were on our way to New York City, where Aunt Ida says the people alll live in sin and filth. Out of nowhere, the sky got all black and the wind whipped up, and the boat just washed out into the water and across the river...// After writing, an opportunity to share was given. Rather than read my own entry, I shared the example chosen by the author of the ariticle to represent the impact a visual prompt can have on the writer. It is from Justin, a homeless student who doesn't like to read and rarely writes. Here is an excerpt: //I am where there is thunder and lots of dangerous animals and I hear the animals and rain. There is a light part, where there are fields and sunshine and quiet, but it is behind me and it feels like I can never be there. It's like I am always alone and it is always dark...I ran up to the dark, dangerous part today because I didn't like how my family acts around their friends and how they treat me different...I tell my mother why I ran away and she tells me that she didn't know how I felt...everything will be back to normal, only better.//

Mary Devries The prompt can be used to stress ideas and content or mood in writing. Create vignettes with real materiaals ( pearls, goblet, letter, sooldier photo or bodhran,pictures, and wizard's staff) and challenge students to create writing centering on the items.

Jeff H. Roper

Here's a prompt: Issue yourself "THE CHALLENGE." Here's the challenge: Substantially change a piece of your own writing. Examine your audience, purpose, point of view, or form of writing. Change the writing substantially so that two-thirds of your writing does not even resemble the original piece of writing. This is called "morphing" the writing. Turn it into something else. Staple the original writing to the back of the revised writing. Several of our writing fellows took the challenge and morphed their writings. This exercise builds confidence in the writer.

Also, if you ever get stuck needing a good writing prompt, check out http://writingfix.com --scroll down to the bottom of the page and discover the 470 different prompts and you can choose which one you like. Good hunting!

Bonnie K. Lane Read __David Goes to School__ by David Shannon. Students choose between non-fiction/narrative. Have students create their own naughty adventures of David. Brainstorm different settings for David to be naughty at. (Naughty things David did at school, home, recess, grocery store, restaurant, church, beach, anywhere you want David to go.) Or you can write about your own "naughty experience". Include the setting, people involved, outcome of your actions, etc. Share creations with the class.

Julie Johnson Allsburg, Chris Van (1996). //The mysteries of Harris Burdick (portfolio version).// Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston, MA. Display pictures around the room. Read the introduction. Summary: Chris Van Allsburg visits a man named Peter Wenders. Wenders used to work for a children's book publisher. Years ago a man named Harris Burdick stopped by Wender's office and said he had written fourteen stories and had drawn pictures for each. He brought one picture from each story to see if Wender's liked his work. Wenders was fascinated! He informed Burdkick that he wanted to read the stories as soon as possible. Burdick left the drawings and agreed to bring the stories by in the morning. Morning came and Burdick was no where to be seen. Days passed. . . Harris Burdick was never seen again and is a complete mystery to this day. "His disappearance is not the only mystery left behind. What were the stories that went with these drawings? There are some clues. Burdick had written a title and caption for each picture. When I told Peter Wenders how difficult it was to look at the drawings and their captions and without imagining a story, he smiled and left the room. He returned with a dust-covered cardboard box. Inside were dozens of stories, all inspired by the Burdick drawings . . . . I spent the rest of my visit reading these stories. They were remarkable, some bizarre, some funny, some downright scary."

Have students walk around the room and study each picture. Choose one and tell its story!

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest:**
 * Steve Maack
 * To Write the Worst Possible First Sentence to a Non-Existent Novel**
 * http://www.bulwer-lytton.com**

//It was a dark and stormy night//; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean. "I know what you're thinking, punk," hissed Wordy Harry to his new editor, "you're thinking, 'Did he use six superfluous adjectives or only five?' - and to tell the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement; but being as this is English, the most powerful language in the world, whose subtle nuances will blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel loquacious?' - well do you, punk?" She looked at her hands and saw the desiccated skin hanging in Shar-Pei wrinkles, confetti-like freckles, and those dry, dry cuticles--even her "Fatale Crimson" nail color had faded in the relentless sun to the color of old sirloin--and she vowed if she ever got out of the Sahara alive, she'd never buy polish on sale at Walgreen's again. The McCain boys strode off proudly to fight in the Civil War, one for the Union and one for the Confederacy, neither of them giving a single thought to who would play them in the television movie of their story, which would be decided more than a hundred years later by 20-something casting agents who kept getting the Civil War and World War II mixed up. A single sparkling tear fell from Little Mary's cheek onto the sidewalk, then slid into the storm drain, there to join in its course the mighty waters of the Los Angeles River and, eventually, Long Beach Harbor, with its state-of-the-art container-freight processing facilities. Her angry accusations burned Clyde like that first bite of a double cheese pizza, when the toppings slide off and sear that small elevation of the oral mucosa, just behind the front teeth, known as the incisive papilla, which is linked to the discriminatory function of the taste buds except, where Clyde was concerned, when it came to women. As Johann looked out across the verdant Iowa River valley, and beyond to the low hills capped by the massive refrigerator manufacturing plant, he reminisced on the history of the great enterprise from its early days, when he and three other young men, all of differing backgrounds, had only their dream of bringing refrigeration to America's heartland to sustain them, to the present day, where they had become the Midwest's foremost group of refrigerator magnates. Herr Professor Doktor Weiss' reputation was made when he conclusively proved the fraudulency of the Mayan codex that claimed to show that that ancient people knew the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter to an exactitude unknown until modern times, in his article, "Bye, Bye, Mesoamerican Pi."
 * The Original: Edward Bulwer-Lytton, from his 1830 novel, //Paul Clifford//**
 * 2006 Winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest**
 * 2006 Runner-Up**
 * Other 2006 Dishonorable Mentions**
 * 2006 Dishonorable Mentions From the Vile Pun Category**
 * Some Past Winners**
 * 2005:** As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.2002: On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.
 * 1999**: Through the gathering gloom of a late-October afternoon, along the greasy, cracked paving-stones slick from the sputum of the sky, Stanley Ruddlethorp wearily trudged up the hill from the cemetery where his wife, sister, brother, and three children were all buried, and forced open the door of his decaying house, blissfully unaware of the catastrophe that was soon to devastate his life.
 * 1998**: The corpse exuded the irresistible aroma of a piquant, ancho chili glaze enticingly enhanced with a hint of fresh cilantro as it lay before him, coyly garnished by a garland of variegated radicchio and caramelized onions, and impishly drizzled with glistening rivulets of vintage balsamic vinegar and roasted garlic oil; yes, as he surveyed the body of the slain food critic slumped on the floor of the cozy, but nearly empty, bistro, a quick inventory of his senses told corpulent Inspector Moreau that this was, in all likelihood, an inside job.
 * 1993:** She wasn't really my type, a hard-looking but untalented reporter from the local cat box liner, but the first second that the third-rate representative of the fourth estate cracked open a new fifth of old Scotch, my sixth sense said seventh heaven was as close as an eighth note from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, so, nervous as a tenth grader drowning in eleventh-hour cramming for a physics exam, I swept her into my longing arms, and, humming "The Twelfth of Never," I got lucky on Friday the thirteenth.
 * 1991**: Sultry it was and humid, but no whisper of air caused the plump, laden spears of golden grain to nod their burdened heads as they unheedingly awaited the cyclic rape of their gleaming treasure, while overhead the burning orb of luminescence ascended its ever-upward path toward a sweltering celestial apex, for although it is not in Kansas that our story takes place, it looks godawful like it.
 * 1990**: Dolores breezed along the surface of her life like a flat stone forever skipping across smooth water, rippling reality sporadically but oblivious to it consistently, until she finally lost momentum, sank, and due to an overdose of fluoride as a child which caused her to lie forever on the floor of her life as useless as an appendix and as lonely as a five-hundred-pound barbell in a steroid-free fitness center.


 * Writing Prompt**: Often we learn about life and ourselves by studying opposites. Write about one or more of the following topics: (a) Try to explain one of your guilty pleasures—something you know is bad, but you really enjoy anyway; (b) Describe an unexpected lesson or turn of events in your life that went from bad to good or good to bad; (c) Try to write one or several bad opening sentences to nonexistent novels (and consider submitting them to the contest for next year).

Amy Morrow Writing Prompt: Close your eyes and picture yourself sitting in your car, or at home. A song comes on the radio and it brings back a memory, or emotion. What is the song that brings back a memory or emotion? Why?

Amy Valentas Writing Prompt: Friendly Letter

__Thank you, Mr.Falker__ By: Patricia Polacco

While I am reading the story, __Thank you, Mr. Falker__, think about someone who has helped you to learn something or just made you feel better about a situation. The individual you choose could be a parent, a friend, a teacher, a relative, etc..

Write a letter to the person who helped you. Start it the way the title of the book does. Thank you, (his or her name).

Melanie Bitler Writing prompt: Narratives involving dialogue

Start by whispering a sentence to a student. Have them pass it on and then write down the sentence they heard. Be sure that as students pass it along they do not repeat and they pass it before they write it down. Then have each student write a short story involving the sentence they were given.

Holly Kimble Writing Prompt: Involving your sense of smell. Fill camera film viles full of different scents. Select a variety. Have students pick one vial, and write on a memory or person or event you associate with that smell. If you are not certain of your smell like Dr. Kear, go ahead and guess anyways! Do not tell students their actual scent until the end when people share.

Dennis J. Kear Writing Prompt: Significant birthday or event. Write the number of a significant birthday or an event in your life. Then begin listing events in your life. As you begin to run out of thoughts add significant events you know from your parents life and finallly your children's lives. Select an event or several that are related and write a letter to one of your relatives about why that event or events are significant and weave it into a memoir about your life. Publish the letter by editing and sending it to the appropriate family member.

Shea McGuire Writing prompt: Car trouble You are traveling in a rental car. You hear a noise but it isn't a flat. It is coming from the trunk. Who or what is making the noise?